Opinion

Great TV and all that jazz

Each episode of Treme, the audacious HBO television epic on the post-Katrina fate of New Orleans, begins with a bright, bouncy theme song:

Down in the Treme is me and my baby we're all going crazy While jumpin' and havin' fun!

It's a pleasant ditty but an oddly perverse introduction to an urban saga that deals with loss and longing far more often than jumpin' and havin' fun.

Admittedly, the local passions of New Orleans are music, food and parades. They get their due in Treme, named for a much-loved, historic but unfashionable district (pronounced Trem-ay). But nothing stops New Orleans from celebrating itself. It never forgets for a minute that it's the seedbed of jazz and therefore the site of a central event in American culture.

Even so, Treme the series springs from the greatest calamity in local history, the breaching in 2006 of the levees under hurricane pressure that suddenly made much of the city uninhabitable. Sadly, the program appears in the shadow of another disaster, the failed oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico that threatens to poison the water and the land of the Louisiana coast.

To all that followed Katrina, David Simon brings the same bold but thoughtful approach that he developed when dealing with Baltimore's downfall in The Wire, which ran for 60 episodes from 2002 to 2008. But he and his co-producer Eric Overmyer, along with a platoon of first-class writers and directors, take a different approach in Treme.

Having now seen seven of the 10 episodes in the first season (a second season will be shot in the autumn), the audience has had a chance to realize that we are watching a revolutionary kind of television.

First, Treme takes a radical approach to music. It doesn't just introduce the dialogue and provide background texture. Several characters are musicians, and we hear them play at some length. The producers take the music as seriously as the musicians do, something new in television drama.

The treatment of character is even more original. Seven major characters, and about a dozen at a secondary level, stay with us from week to week. They don't appear and reappear, in TV's usual style. A character gets more time in one show than in another but never vanishes.

This novelistic storytelling requires prodigious effort but the results justify all the planning and scheming that must have been involved. The term "ensemble," spoken often about acting, acquires fresh meaning.

A third innovation amounts to a still bigger risk: The scripts are measured, sometimes even leisurely.

There are few obvious climaxes. Characters reveal themselves without haste; plots unfold gradually, rarely in obvious ways. Not everyone is happy with this format. On the blogs where Treme is obsessively discussed, some viewers call the style self-indulgent.

"What an abysmal series," one viewer wrote. "Is there a plot lurking somewhere?" But there were people who didn't see much virtue in The Wire at the beginning. Treme is slowly proving itself.

Simon and his colleagues make their style work by braiding together the various plot lines and having the characters interact. In this week's program, seven different stories were given almost equal emphasis.

-Albert Lambreaux (Clarke Peters, the shrewd Lester in The Wire) plays bass and builds houses but passionately commits himself to being chief of a tribe of Mardi Gras Indians, who every year make flamboyant feather-and-spangle costumes to wear in the parade. He's furiously intent on reassembling the scattered fragments of his tribe, a solemn moral responsibility for him. He's equally desperate to revive New Orleans. He gets arrested reopening public housing the federal government has closed down.

-Creighton Bernette (John Goodman), a Tulane English professor, delivers angry You-Tube editorials on the incompetence behind the disaster ( "The flooding of New Orleans was a man-made catastrophe, a federal f--k-up of epic proportions and decades in the making").

YouTube makes him a star, even up in New York. Random House now wants the historical novel he's working on to include Katrina. So the hurricane, having pretty well destroyed his city, may revive his career, or perhaps sink it.

-Toni Bernette (Melissa Leo), the professor's wife, is a civil rights lawyer, searching for a young man who vanished into the jail system after being arrested during the storm; it takes seven episodes before his fate becomes known.

-Annie, a violinist busking for change in the streets (Lucia Micarelli, who has a notable career in both classical and pop music) demonstrates a wonderful talent. Sadly, her jealous boyfriend is an inadequate musician who turns violent when coked up.

-Antoine Batiste (Wendell Pierce, who played Bunk in The Wire), a trombone player, reveals himself as a drunk, a serial adulterer and a runaway dad. Still, he never gives up on his music, his fellow musicians --or New Orleans.

-Janette Desautel (Kim Dickens), a talented and much-admired chef, has to close her restaurant because paying for damages from Katrina destroyed her credit and her insurance money hadn't arrived. When it did come she said, "Too little, too late."

-Davis McAlary (Steve Zahn) is a loser and whiner, a sometime disc jockey who can't keep a job but believes in his city and his music. He was named after Jefferson Davis, the head of the Confederacy, an expression of his mother's brainless racism. He decides to run for city council to expose corruption. He falls deeply in love with his own face on television.

The characters share an intransigent commitment to the future of New Orleans. They know it's decadent but they can't imagine living elsewhere. Each of them believes in the authentic New Orleans though each has a different notion about what that means.

In one scene a discussion of tradition leads far away from New Orleans, north to a famous 1953 concert in Toronto. Delmond Lambreaux, a talented young trumpet player and the son of the Mardi Gras Indian chief, is discussing tradition. A friend says that New Orleans music encompasses "many styles, many traditions." But Delmond, who has been playing in other cities and worshipping other gods, says: "Yeah, but for me traditional is Bird and Diz playing Salt Peanuts at Massey Hall, with Bud Powell and Max Roach." Which proves that Treme, like New Orleans itself, can reach out to find inspiration in even the most distant and exotic places.